The Infinite Air

by Fiona Kidman

  The couple had appeared at the clubhouse soon after the wedding, Amy clinging to her new husband’s side, a huge smile illuminating her face. The newspapers had run a story that morning dubbing them ‘The Flying Sweethearts’.

  ‘It won’t last,’ Nellie muttered darkly to Jean when this was related to her. ‘That man’s a known playboy. You mark my words, he’ll be off as soon as a pretty woman looks at him. Amy’s a fool. He’s just after a famous wife.’

  The marriage had hardly taken place when Amy set off to break Jim’s record to South Africa. This was to become the pattern of their marriage, Jim setting a record, Amy breaking it. Jean and Victor dined out with the couple from time to time, but Jean could see it already, Jim falling more silent as Amy became more animated.

  Later that year, her brother John married Madeleine Murat, in what Madeleine glowingly described to the newspapers after the event as a ‘secret wedding’.

  ‘My own son,’ Nellie said, her eyes glazed with unshed tears, her British upper lip for once trembling, when she read about it. ‘They only live a couple of miles away. Was I that bad a mother, that I didn’t get asked to his wedding?’

  ‘Darling,’ Jean said, putting her arms around Nellie, ‘you’re the very best mother in the world.’ It occurred to her that John would not have wanted her at the ceremony when the congregation was asked if there was any reason why these two people shouldn’t marry. But then again, perhaps she was imagining something that wasn’t there, and it was just Madeleine’s flair for the dramatic that had prompted this public revelation of the ‘secret’ marriage. The couple would be going back to Hollywood soon, she said in one interview.

  FRANK NORTON APPEARED ONE EVENING ON THE DOORSTEP of the room in Hendon. Jean had supposed he would return to New Zealand when he finished his tour of duty in Quetta. In the back of her mind a nagging doubt persisted as she recalled, in bad moments, his promise to come to London, but she hadn’t believed him. Or, worse, hadn’t wanted to believe him. Now, when she saw him, she couldn’t believe her failure to understand that he had meant it.

  ‘Frank Norton,’ Nellie said, ‘what on earth are you doing here?’ Frank stepped inside before she finished speaking and opened his arms, as if he expected Jean to walk straight into them. She held out her hand. ‘It’s very nice to see you, Mr Norton,’ she said.

  ‘Mr Norton — oh that’s a good one. How English you sound, my darling girl.’ He looked around them, at Nellie’s disapproving face, the cramped room. ‘Come on,’ he said, his voice full of urgency, ‘I’ll take you somewhere we can talk.’

  This was a small pub across the road, low-beamed and heavy with cigarette smoke. He ordered drinks, a beer for himself, a lemonade for her.

  ‘I’ll have to get you out of that place,’ he said. ‘I should have sent more money.’

  ‘It’s been enough to help me with my flying,’ she said. ‘I do appreciate it. I hope to start repaying you soon.’

  ‘No hurry,’ he said easily. ‘I’m flush. I’ve had my pay out from the air force. Five hundred quid. Enough to buy a house when we get back home.’

  ‘Home?’ she said.

  ‘New Zealand.’

  ‘Frank, London’s my home. Don’t you understand?’

  He didn’t, and there appeared to be no way of convincing him that she wanted to stay where she was. ‘Frank, you don’t know me,’ she said, ‘really, you don’t. Once my mind’s set on anything, it’s useless to try to swerve me from my purpose, or take away my enthusiasm. I love it here. I’m going to finish what I set out to do.’

  But he had bought a car, he told her, so that they could go touring around the countryside, up to Scotland perhaps. It was as if she hadn’t spoken. They might as well see a bit before they settled down. And he’d joined the club at Stag Lane, so they could fly together.

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘You can’t do that.’

  ‘Jean,’ he said, ‘stop this nonsense. I can join any club I like. I want to spend as much time as I can with you from now on. We’ve been apart for too long. We’re only staying here in England until you’ve got your licence and then we’re going home, the way I said. You can earn some money back there. There’s no reason why you can’t keep flying until we start a family. I’ll keep helping you out until you’ve finished.’

  ‘I don’t want us to get married,’ Jean said, straining so hard to speak that she could hardly get the words out.

  ‘Of course you do,’ he said. ‘Do you think I’d have been sending you all that money if you weren’t going to marry me?’

  ‘I’m going to fly to Australia,’ she said, holding back angry tears.

  ON A MURKY NIGHT IN NOVEMBER, TRAVERS INFORMED Jean that it was time for her to make the return night flight from Stag Lane to Croydon airfield, followed by the aerobatics test the following day. This was the final test for her commercial licence. She had been flying steadily in the weeks before, mounting up the final hours as fast as she could. Frank Norton paid for the use of an aeroplane each time she needed one. The faster she could obtain the licence, she now believed, the faster she could escape him. In the evenings, she no longer went to the clubhouse, lest Victor Dorée should appear. She and Nellie continued to dine once a week at Oakleigh, and some evenings she and Victor went in to the city. She did not want gossip about her, she told Frank icily when he invited her out. She had other friends, other commitments, it was not possible to spend every evening with him. There was something trusting about Frank that almost made her pity him. Pity, she thought, was very close to contempt.

  But for the moment it seemed that she depended on him. If she failed the last test, she could not afford to sit it again.

  As she made ready for the solo night flight, Travers came hurrying across to her, waving a small torch.

  ‘You never know when you might need this,’ he said.

  Some fifteen minutes after her takeoff, the navigation lights failed. None of the instruments were luminous. She sat in the dark cockpit flashing the torch on the instrument panel, her fear mounting, as she tried to work out how to reach the ground. By now the plane had been reported over Biggin Hill without lights. A red beacon at Croydon appeared. Circling the aerodrome several times, she flashed the torch on and off and, at last, saw in the darkness beneath her a green rocket signal advising that she could land. Throttling back her engine, she glided onto the floodlit runway.

  In the morning, she returned to Croydon to complete the final part of the test, a series of spins, seemingly easy after the events of the night before. Victor was at the airport to congratulate her. So, too, was Frank Norton. She kissed each one on the cheek, as if both were mere acquaintances, and moved on. Neither man gave any indication of knowing the other.

  The Dorées held a celebratory lunch for her the following Sunday. Already Nellie and Jean had enjoyed Sunday lunches when the married brothers came, bringing their wives, and this Sunday everyone was there. There was laughter, and toasts to Jean. Herbert Dorée sat at the head of the table, smiling around him with pleasure. The table was set with Wedgwood and crystal and silver. Servants glided silently in and out over the thick green carpet.

  ‘So what next for our little Antipodean?’ Victor’s father asked.

  ‘I still want to fly to Australia,’ Jean said. ‘I want to be the fastest person who ever flew there.’ She laughed, as if half-joking. It was not the first time she had said this, but always lightly, as if speaking of the impossible.

  ‘All Jean needs is an aeroplane,’ Nellie said.

  ‘Of course she does,’ Victor said, turning to his mother. ‘Mater, could you lend us the money? I’ll be Jean’s business partner. She’ll make a fortune out of speaking tours, you know.’

  His mother gave an indulgent smile. ‘Well, you do have a plane dear,’ she said, ‘but I suppose you wouldn’t want to be without it while Jean’s away. Why not? Have you got a plane in mind?’

  ‘I can speak to Fielden, the fellow who looks after the Prince of Wales,’ Victor sai
d. ‘His Moth is up for sale. The King’s put a stop to his flying. I don’t think he’ll care much about the price.’

  ‘That sounds perfect,’ his mother said. ‘Dear, do pass the vegetables to Mrs Batten.’

  THE COST OF EVERYTHING WAS WORRYING FRANK. Jean had seen the way he turned his money over these days before he spent it. Sooner or later, she knew, it would run out. He wanted to think of himself as a man of means, like the people he was mixing with at Stag Lane, but it was temporary. There was only so much one could eat and drink and spend on restaurants, and petrol, and flowers, and still have change over from the five hundred pounds he had boasted of having when he arrived in London. Her flying lessons would have added up to just a fraction of this sum. Now that Jean had her licence he told her they should be thinking about booking a passage. He could book for all three of them, if that was what suited her and her mother.

  She said again that she wasn’t returning to New Zealand.

  ‘Jean,’ he said with exaggerated patience, ‘of course you are. But you deserve a holiday first. I want you and me to go away together for a few days. Just the two of us.’

  ‘Frank, I am not going. Not to New Zealand, not for a holiday. Forget it.’

  A dark flash of anger crossed his face. ‘Do your friends at the club know how you pay for your lessons?’ he said.

  ‘Frank, you wouldn’t tell them,’ she said, her voice urgent. A cold hard knot of dislike tightened in her stomach. It had been there all along, only she hadn’t seen it for what it was. And now she felt frightened of him as well.

  His face had set in stubborn lines. There was nothing for it, she decided, but to motor to Wales with him as he had arranged. There, she would try to work out what to do next. In the mood that he was in, she thought it important not to surprise him. They had to do something alone, he insisted, something they could look back on when they were old, and tell the children about. Nellie, who had already been on one journey with them, didn’t want to go. Driving in the back seat was not her style, and the man was such a bore, didn’t Jean think so?

  He had bought them new leather suitcases. The hotel he had booked them into was set far into the Welsh countryside. When they drew up outside, Frank took a ring from his pocket and thrust it on her finger. It was a plain band set with small stones, much as her mother had worn when she still lived with her father.

  ‘Have you told them we’re married?’ Jean said.

  ‘Yes, of course,’ he said. While she tried to pull the ring off, he said, ‘Jean, you have to leave it on. We mightn’t be able to afford a honeymoon in New Zealand. This is it.’

  They were the only ones in the dining room. A small fire spluttered in a grate, but Jean shivered and declared herself not hungry, picking at an indifferent meal of stew. Their conversation was desultory. Frank drank some wine, then retired to the bar for what he described as a quick nightcap. In the bedroom, she took off her clothes and lay down naked on the bed, so that he could see her unclothed, the small apples of her breasts tingling in the cool November damp of the room.

  When he came in, he looked down at her, his face flushed. ‘Corker titties,’ he said.

  She let him enter her without protest. He made whimpering expressions of gratitude when it was done, and again in the morning when he took her again. She felt neither pain nor pleasure, rather something like resignation. This, she supposed, was what whores did. It seemed futile to complain.

  On the way back to London, he held her hand. She let it lie limp in his. He glanced sideways at her several times. Once or twice she thought she glimpsed regret in his profile, his eyes staring at the road straight ahead, as if wondering if what they had done was a mistake.

  As they sat in the car, outside the room Nellie and Jean shared, she told him she had acquired a plane to fly to Australia.

  His body stiffened in the seat beside her. ‘I don’t believe you. Who would buy you a plane?’

  ‘A friend,’ she said. ‘You should go back to New Zealand.’

  When he began to demur she said softly, ‘You can’t afford all those suitcases, Frank.’

  Jean opened the car door and climbed out. She walked away without looking back.

  CHAPTER 18

  1933. IT WAS A YEAR WHEN ALL KINDS of things happened. It had hardly begun when Bert Hinkler died. The Australian Lone Eagle who had made the very first solo flight between England and Australia. The man who had been greeted by eighty thousand people in Sydney, singing ‘Hinkler, Hinkler little star’, and now there was a Tin Pan Alley song they called ‘Hustling Hinkler’. You could dance a Hinkler foxtrot or a Hinkler quickstep. The man who had sat on the floor of Parliament in Australia. ‘You know,’ he had said in an interview that day, ‘one day, people will fly by night and use the daylight for sightseeing.’ And now he was dead. Hinkler had crashed in a remote part of the Italian countryside, near Florence. Jean remembered the way he had studied the ibis as they flew in order to understand the nature of flight, before he began his inventions. She shivered when she heard the news. Don’t believe in omens, Nellie told her sternly. Those were for the superstitious.

  Charles Kingsford Smith came to town on a brief visit, and gave her some of his maps. He and Charles Ulm, whom she had taken to calling Charlie whenever she saw him, both got in touch with her when they were in London. Jean felt she could confide in them. Victor had suggested that they keep their plans for her attempt on the record to themselves, but these were two men she trusted, and they seemed far away from the tight circles of London gossip. They had their own records to set, their business to pursue. She felt she was one of them now, someone they had put on her way. Smithy no longer told her not to try to break men’s records. ‘Go get ’em, girl,’ he said, when he handed over the maps.

  He took her to a pub where they drank to the memory of Bert. When she ordered lemonade, he demanded she try something stronger. ‘I’ll have champagne,’ she said, daring herself to try again. As the bubbles surfaced she felt the spirit of Hinkler rising. ‘To Bert,’ they said, lifting their glasses.

  With the help of Group Captain Fielden, Victor had purchased the promised plane from the royal flying unit. The logbook showed the DH60 M Gipsy Moth G-AALG registered jointly in the names of Jean Batten and Victor Dorée. The royal colours were a blue fuselage and silver wings, but a condition of the sale was that the colours be changed. Jean asked that the blue be changed to a lighter shade, with a fine white line running the length of the fuselage.

  There were technical matters to be addressed, modifications to be made to the plane. Jean had routes to plan, visas for landing in different countries to arrange, and landing permissions and information about fuel supplies to obtain. In all she would pass through fourteen countries on her 10,500-mile journey.

  The Moth’s engine was gravity-fed from a standard tank in the wing. Victor had two extra tanks fitted. The larger, holding an extra twenty-seven gallons of fuel, was placed in the front cockpit and covered over, the second behind the rear pilot’s seat. Victor had a hand pump installed so that the engine could be topped up in flight by pumping from the two new tanks. The flying range of the Gipsy Moth, normally two hundred and fifty miles, had thus been increased to eight hundred. There was very little space left for the pilot.

  During the preparation of the Moth, a disagreement arose between Victor and Jean over the safety of the con-rods, which had a record of being prone to metal fatigue where the serial number was stamped. Jean wanted the engine dismantled, and Nellie was all for it, but Victor insisted that the Prince’s plane would not have been released without a complete overhaul. The costs were beginning to mount beyond his and his mother’s budget. They agreed, half-heartedly on Jean’s part, not to pursue the matter any further.

  Now that the attempt on the record had become a reality, the need to keep the flight secret until the very last moment intensified. Jean was concerned that someone with a plane more prepared for a long-distance flight might set out ahead of her. Perhaps Amy Johnson, or
Mrs Mollison as she was now known. After three years, she was still the only woman to have flown to Australia, and seemed always ready for new attempts on records.

  Jean had begun a regime of exercise. First thing every morning she swam in the baths, then stood in the park and skipped for twenty minutes, just the way she had at Madame Valeska’s dancing school: Lizzie Borden took an axe/and gave her mother forty whacks … Over and over. Far into each night, she spread plans on the floor. Nellie kept watch over her, all the while stitching and hemming garments. She turned coats, and trimmed hats, made delicate undergarments. Jean had a new white silk dress that Victor insisted on buying her at Harrods, but not an inch of the silk from the old one would be wasted, Nellie declared. Not that underwear was really a problem either. Victor carried suitcases of silk panties with him on his travels to Australia.

  There came a moment when all the preparations were made. Nellie and Jean laid out everything Jean needed for the journey. She would go out to the plane wearing a long jacket with a fur collar, and a beret. You just never know, somebody might get wind of you going, Victor said, and she needed to look her best. Besides, the Dorée family were all planning to turn out. De Havilland, the only other person in on the secret, had intimated that he would like to come. She would change into her flying gear before she boarded the plane, a long leather flying coat, helmet and goggles. Victor had bought her a white helmet for when she reached the tropics, and a white flying suit. Jean wrapped up her belongings in a brown paper parcel, ready to take with her on the flight.

  Victor did tell the press at the very last moment. He was, after all, a partner in the undertaking. Nellie had gone on ahead to Lympne airport, where aviators flying abroad had to clear Customs, while Jean collected her plane from Stag Lane. Victor had arranged for her to be driven there by his chauffeur, as befitted a star in the making. He sat in the front while Jean sat in the back, overtaken by bouts of terror. As they drove to Stag Lane, she saw bluebells in flower, washes of colour beneath the trees. She wished that Nellie was with her. The Dorée family was gathered, and Victor’s father had arranged for a movie camera to record the event. Only the Sunday Dispatch had responded to Victor’s press release. The reporter saw it as a scoop, interviewing Jean and eliciting from her the information that the flight had been planned in secrecy for months. De Havilland did turn up, boyish and excited that another of his planes was going to make the long journey to Australia. ‘Did I ever tell you about my hobby?’